Faith and Ritual

Maybe "High Church" ritualized religion persisted for good reason

This post is inspired by one from HollyMathNerd¹ and one from KeithLowery² Both are excellent and provide much food for thought. I made notes as comments on both and it seemed to me I could usefully merge and extend those comments into a post.

Humans Need Faith

I think humans have evolved to need faith in something bigger. People³ need a feeling of belonging and belief in a shared deity allows that belonging to extend beyond the 200 person tribe / family group of the stone age. By sharing belief in the same sky gods we build commonality with others we have never met. Also having an external object allows us to measure our tribal leaders against a more or less objective standard.

This seems to have been true since prehistory. We have foundation myths of the Yamnaya Proto Indo-Europeans (via sanskrit texts mostly), we have foundation myths of the Japanese, the Finns, the Egyptians, the Jews and probably others that I’m blanking on. In all cases there are Gods involved. There are obviously differences but the fundamental fact is that all primitive tribesmen had a myth of how the earth was formed that was handed down from shaman to priest and they all involved Gods. Moreover those Gods all expected their worshippers to do something. The simplest - the nature spirit ones like Shinto - expected respect of the sacred places and rituals celebrating the turn of the seasons. More complex ones laid down moral codes such as the 10 commandments and other restrictions on things like diet, dress and marriage. In all cases though one of the key aspects was to gather together believers in the same Gods and exclude those that believed in other ones. In some cases researchers these days can suggest that pantheons were merged as tribe A encountered tribe B and then rather than kill each other the two lived together in some kind of harmony (possibly one as a superior to the other, possibly not).

Gradually - starting a few centuries BC - we saw religions with more exotic and typically more universal beliefs: Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Mithraism and Christianity. One things these new religions seem to have in common is belief in a single God and an explicit disavowal of all other Gods. This of course was what got the Jews in trouble with Rome - Rome wanted a temple to Caesar as well as the Jewish Temple. The Jews refused, unlike all the other conquered religions whose Gods were generally localish and who could easily accept the existence of new Gods and whose Gods (and priests and teachings) were fine with someone making a sacrifice to the old Gods and the new one.

Much the same can be seen (as I understand it, I am less of an expert here) in Buddhism vs Hinduism. Hindus just see Buddhists (or Jains or even Christians for that matter) as devotees of another God, but they think that God has a place in the Hindu pantheon somewhere. Buddhists on the other hand do not accept the existence of any of the Hindu Gods.

Having a God (singular) and with it a book of beliefs and behaviors was an innovation that was extremely successful. The book tended to explain what prayer did and why it might not work. It often talked coherently about what happened after death. It contained some kind of moral code that applied to everyone from the ruler down to the poorest peasant with the judgement of God after death based on how devout the person was. In our cynical 20th and 21st century secularism we may wonder just how many rulers actually believed, but evidence suggests many did. Many were even devout believers who did things that were counter to their short term interests at the behest of the priesthood because they feared for eternal damnation (or being reborn as a slug or whatever the equivalent was in their religion). It is certainly true that some got the priests on their side to justify what they were doing, but that doesn’t mean they did not also believe that God meant them to do whatever it was. The same applied all the way down. People gave vast fortunes to their religion to get a reward in the next life, creative sorts were inspired by the stories to create magnificent music, art and architecture and so on. This could not happen if most people were cynical about the religion they claimed to follow.

In the 20th century people tried replacing the object of faith from “man in the sky” to other things like “science”, “the NHS” or “marxism” and it didn’t work. Belief in Marxism was generally shattered by its failure everywhere it has been tried. Sure credulous sorts still think it would work if “done properly”, but most of us can see the devastation it left behind and don’t want it.

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“Science” seemed plausible until 2020. Then we learned that “Science” was just as arbitrary and wrong as Marxism. The Scientific method is great. But “I believe in Science and Fauci is its prophet” went down in flames when the science caused much misery and failed to protect

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As Holly wrote:

COVID revealed the truth. I do not have any rights at all. Nor do any of you. What we have are privileges, and they are dependent on one thing only. If, at any time, people with PhD after their name are willing to interpret data in a way that justifies taking our privileges away, then they will be gone…The fundamental axioms of the world I thought I lived in — the things I didn’t question, didn’t doubt, didn’t consider debatable — were all shown to be fiction.

It’s no surprise that now that we’ve realized that these alternate idols have feet of clay at best and more likely feet of sewerage that people are looking back to the original “man in the sky” faiths that have motivated over a millennium (arguably two for Christianity) and led to good things on the whole.

And of course it is notable that expressions like “feet of clay” come from the Bible. As Richard Dawkins said recently, the secular liberal atheist is where he is because of the foundations of Christianity underneath.

Organized Rituals Are Key

Keith wonders why people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and other prominent converts from secularism seem drawn to the higher chuch end of things

I have pondered the same phenomena in one of my own posts, although my own ruminations were over the preference these high profile converts have shown for high church manifestations of Christianity rather than, say, non-denomination evangelicalism.

I think one difference is that high church Christianity has public rituals. And as I live in Japan, I think it is worth pointing out that this isn’t a purely Western Christian thing. Probably the biggest “cult” in Japan is the Soka Gakkai, which is a form of Nichiren Buddhism. My understanding of Soka Gakkai is that it very much expects its adherents to make regular devotions and to generally do so publicly. This is rather unlike the far more lax expectations of most Buddist temples in Japan who conduct rituals less regularly and more privately.

We miss those because they can remind us of our faith. Sure we can replace some of them with other rituals (lowering the flag at sunset as a secular example) but high church rituals link the ritual to faith and belief. Since my father was an Anglican priest I grew up accustomed to hearing him and my mother recite Morning Prayer and Evensong every day, and to attend Holy Communion on Sundays. Yes of course you can say your own prayers and you can attend a church and say them with others. But a more rigid format, saying the same words day after day, Sunday after Sunday, helps remind you why you say them

[A]s our Saviour Christ hath taught us, we are bold to say,

OUR Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth, As it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

Every word in that has meaning. And as you repeat them you can mediate on the meaning, can meditate on the sermon(s) where the meanings were explained and so on.

My father was a firm believer in the traditional Anglican prayer book as a liturgy. In his view that liturgy worked precisely because it was not in daily speech. We don’t say “thy” or “hath” normally and having a liturgy that does so makes it special. When we understand what they mean using the older forms helps switch our brains in to religion mode and thus to remove some of the distractions of the secular world. This is a common feature of many religions - the holy texts and liturgies are in an older language (old church slavonic, latin, sanskrit) - and almost certainly helps. It’s why even today, even in English speaking places, the Catholic latin mass is popular even though the laity (and perhaps the priest) don’t understand all the words. In fact I suggest it is popular in part because we don’t understand and therefore have to concentrate.

Back to religion and ritual. I think it is interesting that Lauren Southern in recent her interview with Mary Harrington said she wanted to “follow the listicle”:

Southern was, she recounts, part of the first generation to grow up predominantly online. She and her sister (now a DJ and Twitch streamer) spent their adolescence in the kind of internet hinterlands where wild ideas flourish, free of grounding in material reality or practical experience.

Here, once-complex theories are swiftly distilled to their bare essentials, for maximum viral reach. As Southern puts it: “Follow the listicle, and you’ll be fine.” By the time she met her husband, she’d been condensing conservative values into “listicle” form as a media influencer for some years – to the point where it seemed possible to realise this framework in real life, too.

That sort of desire - whether it’s the tradlife (in Southern’s case) or something else for those who go to the other extreme with wokery - to have a simple set of rules that you can follow and be happy seems to be common. The traditional religion, for all its faults, provides that list of rules and, while there’s no doubt that there are abuses and yes no doubt that women often feel the brunt of them, usually seems to provide a stability and predictability that makes for contentment. Moreover (and unlike wokery or onlibe tradlife) organized religion gives you a person outside the marriage - a priest usually - who can mediate between husband and wife and who can perhaps explain to the abusive party why they are doing it wrong. Ritual is a part of this. Perhaps that’s why wokery is popular because the 15 minute denunciation of the cause du jour gathers the believers together.

Ritual in some ways predates religion - at least the current monotheistic ones liek Christianity. Shamanistic religions celebrate the harvest, the spring planting, the longest day, the longest night and so on. Often there are specific rituals: dancing the maypole, processions carrying the local god around the shrine and so on, and often Christianity has embraced and extended them like a religious version of Microsoft. Rituals of this form have been a part of the human condition from prehistory up until the secular 20th century where the atheists did their best to kill them. All that happened of course was they killed the religious core and left the husk without it - hence “happy holidays” and so on. But since humans still desire rituals and groups performing them we come up with new ones (spring break, annual sportsball events, the olympics), which are less fulfilling because there’s no core.

Having a religion that gives meaning to rituals makes it all more meaningful. I think that if you are coming from a world of secular unbelief, the rituals help to remind you and strengthen your faith in a way that unstructured more vague belief does not. Hence the attraction of rituals when searching for religion.

1. The Disappearance of Secularism

2. The Myth of Secular Neutrality

and

Remembering Our Names

3. As

Josh Slocum

and

Holly MathNerd

often say, insert your own “but not all” qualifiers - most people, many people etc. but not all - this is a post of generalizations